Rialto >> Lawyers for the school district are refusing to identify any employees involved in the creation or oversight of a controversial assignment last spring that asked eighth-graders to argue whether or not the Holocaust actually occurred.

Rialto Unified’s new legal firm, Fagen, Friedman and Fulfrost, released more than 200 pages of documents related to the Holocaust assignment on Wednesday afternoon, but the names of all school district staffers involved were withheld to ensure their safety.

“Employee names and other personally identifiable information have been redacted,” attorney Jay Fernow wrote in a letter accompanying the documents. “This decision is based on the district’s concern for the safety of the employees, based on prior threats of death and violence.”

On May 5, the day after news broke about the Holocaust essay assignment, the Los Angeles News Group asked for documents related to the assignment, including records of its creation, the vetting process, communications related to the assignment and any complaints received regarding the assignment.

Additional requests the same week sought the district’s policies on curriculum development, document retention, handling of public records requests and spending on legal services.

Under the California Public Records Act, Gov. Code 6250, government agencies have 10 days from the time they receive a request to determine whether they’ll be able to comply with it. Under “unusual circumstances,” which are outlined in the law, agencies can extend that up to 14 days.

Among the documents sought by those critical of the Holocaust assignment is a 47-page report summarizing an investigation into the creation of the assignment by Lozano Smith.

District administrators initially characterized the assignment — which included quotes from a Holocaust denial website as one of the three “credible sources” distributed to the district’s roughly 2,000 eighth-graders in February — as a critical thinking assignment. After becoming the object of international condemnation, district officials publicly apologized and promised the assignment would not be repeated.

No teachers, parents or staff complained about the in-class assignment, which was developed by a team of Rialto Unified eighth-grade English teachers, according to former Associate Superintendent of Educational Services Susan Levine. She has since departed the district.

The documents released Wednesday include an email that appears to have been sent on Dec. 16 to all district principals announcing the assignment.

“Our team of middle school English teachers have been hard at work in updating the writing prompt ‘Response to Literature’ to ‘Research’ for the third quarter. They have done an excellent job in completing this project,” according to the -mail, which had “Please forward to all ELA teachers” as its subject line.

The name of the sender and recipients of the email have been withheld by the district.

About the Author

Beau covers education and politics for The Sun and the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. Reach the author at Beau.Yarbrough@langnews.com
or follow Beau on Twitter: @lby3.